


Of Subterfuge and Scrunchies

by willowcrowned



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Riza Hawkeye is eminently amused, Roy Mustang is disgustingly in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:48:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25816060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowcrowned/pseuds/willowcrowned
Summary: 'Roy knocks on Riza’s— Hawkeye’s, theoretically, but he doesn’t think he could train himself out of thinking of her as Riza at this point, even if he wanted to— door, thinking, not for the first time, how very lucky he is to have someone that won’t ignore him when he bothers them about work at eleven at night. '
Relationships: Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang
Comments: 13
Kudos: 68





	Of Subterfuge and Scrunchies

**Author's Note:**

> One night, I was thinking about how much I love Riza Hawkeye (as one does) while I got ready for bed. I ended up putting a pink scrunchie in, and then I started thinking about her with a pink scrunchie, and then I woke up 1700 words later. There is really no explanation.

Roy knocks on Riza’s— Hawkeye’s, theoretically, but he doesn’t think he could train himself out of thinking of her as Riza at this point, even if he wanted to— door, thinking, not for the first time, how very lucky he is to have someone that won’t ignore him when he bothers them about work at eleven at night. She opens it half a minute later looking like she’s not at all surprised that he’d shown up; she’s too used to him appearing out of the blue to be anything other than resigned. 

Riza is already in her pajamas, soft grey things that show more skin than anything she’d wear otherwise, looking content, if a bit tired. (She’s just wearing a pair of shorts and a tank top. He doesn’t need to be distracted. He is absolutely distracted.) 

“Hello, sir,” she says with her typical equanimity. “Did you need something?” 

He did, actually, and she obviously knows that, because he wouldn’t have shown up at her apartment at 11pm otherwise. When they try to spread rumors that they’re sleeping together (not that the rumors really need help; Riza is terrifyingly competent, but some people just won’t believe that she’s not spreading her legs for her CO), they go to his place. 

“I—” He stops, noticing her hair. It’s braided back, but it’s fallen to the right side of her face. She looks stunningly attractive with her hair like that, but that’s not news; she always looks stunningly attractive, even when she hasn’t slept in three days. (Not that Roy will ever voice that thought, especially not where Maes might hear.) Roy blinks. “Is that a bow?” 

It is, in fact, a bow. It is a bow made out of soft, very, very pale pink, satin, and it’s on the end of Riza’s plait. 

Riza raises an eyebrow, eyes glittering with amusement. “It’s actually a scrunchie.” She flips the end of her hair over to show where the bow is attached to a hairband. “Edward had his elastic break in the middle of that shootout last week. A little girl gave it to him, and he couldn’t find her afterward.” 

“So he gave it to you?” Roy really doesn’t mean to sound so shocked, but, well, it’s _Riza_. Even when she was young and delicate, all long limbs and waist length hair, she had been too no-nonsense for anything pink, dressing exclusively in practical trousers and t-shirts. 

“Yes,” Riza can’t keep the amusement out of her voice. “I am, after all, a woman.” 

Roy can’t think of a response that doesn’t make him sound like an idiot or a lech, so he just blinks. “May I come in?” 

“Of course.” She steps to the side, letting him brush past her into the narrow hallway. This close, it’s impossible to not notice the smell of her citrus body wash, and Roy inhales, trying not to look like he’s smelling it on purpose. When he meets her eyes, Riza gives him a look that says she clearly knows what he’s doing. He is so, so, fucked. 

He settles at the kitchen table as she begins to make tea, tapping three times on the table, their signal for asking if they’re bugged. She shakes her head. 

“How serious is this?” She asks, back turned to him. What she means, of course, is ‘am I going to be able to get more than two hours of sleep?’ 

“Not immediate,” Roy reassures, watching her brush her braid back over her shoulder. She really has beautiful hair. (And he’s an idiot for constantly being distracted by her, but what else is new?) “It’s just a precaution. Grumman saddled me with another missing persons.” 

Even without seeing her, he can tell she’s raising her eyebrows. “Is that so?” 

Roy sighs. “Colonel Orita was just transferred from Southern.” 

Riza makes a vague sort of affirmative sound, enough to let him know that she knows what he’s talking about, even if she’s not quite sure what he’s getting at. 

“Grumman is finding him hard to control, so he wants to send him up north.” 

“He’s giving you extra work so that he can complain Orita has been useless?” Riza sounds amused. Which is _not fair_ , because Roy can’t send Edward because missing persons is essentially code for ‘gruesome murders’ and Edward is a thirteen-year-old, so he’ll have to send Riza, possibly with Havoc, and they’ll get to go have a paid vacation while Grumman dumps all of Orita’s work on him. Well, they’ll probably have to get themselves abducted and then arrest a murderer, but other than that, they get a paid vacation. 

Roy groans. “Do you find pleasure in my suffering, Second Lieutenant?” 

“I wasn’t aware that schadenfreude was a punishable offense, _sir_.” She would never dare sass him like this in the office, which is partially why he stopped by. 

She turns around, handing him a cup. He doesn’t even need to taste it to know that it’s 75% milk with an obscene amount of sugar. 

“That barely qualifies as tea, you know,” she says. “At a certain point, it’s just tea-flavored milk.” 

“You could always spike it instead,” Roy suggests. 

Riza rolls her eyes fondly. “You don’t hold your liquor well enough for that.” 

He frowns at her, but it’s true. For all growing up in a brothel had done for him, help him develop a tolerance it did not. It’s why he barely ever drinks. 

“Why the forewarning?” She asks. 

“Because Orita has the office bugged—” 

She sends him a look. She knew that. Obviously, she knew that. No one in the military just gives away potted plants, which Orita had done to all his coworkers, but especially Roy, the second he’d gotten in from Southern. 

“—and I need you to drop something off for me.” 

She tilts her head the slightest amount, taking a sip from her cup, which she holds with both hands. There is very little about Riza Hawkeye that is cute, but holding her mugs with two hands is definitively adorable. As is wearing a hair ribbon that belonged to a nine-year-old girl. 

Roy is disgustingly in love. He should really stop, one of these days, but he doesn’t think he’s capable at this point. Besides, she’s fine with it, so there’s not really a point in trying to. (There are many points, in fact, first and foremost that he is not exactly rational when it comes to the people he really loves. Those people are limited to Riza and Maes, but still. They’re a weak flank. Thank goodness they can actually defend themselves, or he’d probably have died of stress by now.) 

“An old girlfriend of mine” (by which he means Vanessa, who has never been nor will ever be his girlfriend, at least while both of them are sapient and not drooling vegetables with no common sense left) “is taking a vacation out East. There’s a letter I need you to give her.” 

It’s for his aunt. She’s involved in some sort of drug trafficking ring, which he knows nothing about, because plausible deniability, and she needs some of his information on the MPs that guard the borders to Drachma, which he doesn’t have and knows nothing about, because plausible deniability. 

“Of course, sir,” Riza looks amused, which probably means she’s guessed at least half of what he’s thinking based on his face. It’s unfortunate that she can read him this well. He’s a very good liar otherwise, and he’s not willing to sacrifice that to start working on a whole new set of facial expressions just so Riza can’t read him. (Besides, he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t nice sometimes.) “Anything else?” 

He drains the last of his mug of tea. “Nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.” ‘Nothing that we don’t want Orita to hear,’ he means. 

He doesn’t really resent being bugged, though it does worry him a bit. In the military, it’s almost an insult if someone _doesn’t_ bug you, because that means that they think you’re not a threat, and Roy is very good at pretending not to be a threat. It’s why he only has one bug in his office— two, if you count Orita’s recent foray into gardening— and it’s from Grumman. (It’s hidden in quite a clever place, too. Grumman had inserted a false back to the alcove under his desk and put the bug behind it. It matches the surrounding wood perfectly, and had taken Roy almost three weeks to find.) Unfortunately, the fact that Orita has thought to bug him and not, say, Browning, means that Orita is smarter than Grumman likes to keep around— Roy being the exception to that rule. (Grumman says it’s because Roy makes him look good to the higher-ups, but Roy knows that he mostly just wants Roy in case Grumman really has to fuck shit up subtly. Roy is really good at subtly fucking shit up, so good that barely anyone has noticed the way that every single higher-up who has tried to get him demoted has been very carefully booted out of their positions.) 

Riza shows him to the door, the barely-hidden smile making it clear that she’s aware of his self-aggrandizing inner monologue and, while she agrees with the content, she can’t really approve of the tone. 

“I have to ask,” Roy says, as he steps through the door, “why are you wearing the ribbon?” 

“It matches my eyes,” she says, deadpan. It really doesn’t— okay, well it does, but she is absolutely messing with him. 

He raises an eyebrow, copying her. “Is that so?” 

She gives him an exasperated, if fond, look. “Nearly all of my hairbands have gone missing or broken. The only one left is too loose to hold the end of a braid.” 

“Ah,” Roy says, curiosity assuaged. “It really does suit your eyes.” 

Riza can’t keep a fond smile from her face. “ _Good night_ , Colonel.” 

He grins at her, fully and unashamedly, in the way that he rarely has the opportunity to do. “Good night, Second Lieutenant.” 

The next day after lunch, when Riza gets back into the office, she finds two packs of hairbands in her desk drawer with no note. One pack is entirely made up of scrunchies that are an incredibly pale pink with a floral design, and the other is a pack of black, no-nonsense, elastics. 

If Roy knows where either of them came from then, well, he certainly doesn’t tell.

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't intending to post this until I had some (more serious) Roy/Riza stuff up, but the semester starts tomorrow and I wanted to get something up before I inevitably get swept away in the flow of things and have no time/energy/desire to write and/or edit.
> 
> As always, kudos and comments are much appreciated :D


End file.
